I laughed myself sick, since Newsweek put a snide global warming cover on the stands the same week NASA noticed their books had been cooked.
Good point Foxfier.
The reality-based community has to backtrack and explain how they got duped into believing like little sheep that 1998 was the hottest year in history.
Doc wrote: promising everything and delivering nothing
Close but not quite. They promise everything and nothing while delivering an oppressive mental fog midway between existence and non-existence.
More specifically:
They promise a method by which you can't lose and argument. They deliver nothing but submission to arbitrary whim. Who's whim? It doesn't matter. All whims are held as equal. Its just that some whims are more equal than others.
They promise a new identity. They deliver membership in a hive of mutually sacrificial and interchangeable parts. "We are the Borg. Resistance is futile."
They promise a new and deeper insight. They deliver a world in which a US Senitor running for the Presidency could proudly proclaim "I voted for the war before I voted against it". He had the audacity to expect such a comment would win him respect that he had not earned.
They promise freedom from the dictates of realty. They deliver the destruction of the ability to know, to think, to act, and ultimately, to live. See just about any socilist/communist people's paradise for instructive detail.
Postmodernism is a demented intellectual hall of mirrors in which the only reality is endless recursive reflections. No starting point. No ending point. Just reflections, reflecting still more reflections, endlessly reflecting the reflections. The leaders of the demented movement are as entrapped by the madness as the followers.
Until we break the mirrors and escape from the hall of madness, we are bound to the hive.
Ideas matter. Fundamental ideas matter most.
"Global Warming" is just the latest scare coming from the Chicken Littles of the world. Does anyone remember about 20 years ago how "Acid Rain" was going to be the death of us all? You couldn't watch a TV newscast or read a newspaper without "Acid Rain" taking a prominent role. And it between we've had the hype that "AIDS" or "Herpes" was going to be the end of us all. Not to mention that in the 1970s the scare-mongerers said we only had a few more years worth of gasoline!
Methinks those "global warming" boosters should read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"!
Newsweek has not changed in over 50 year except to get worse.
When I was a in High School (early 1950's), my family received a new subscription to Newsweek. While reading the first copy we received, I noticed in article after article the inclusion of opinion and naked bias in otherwise supposedly hard news. Since then, I have not trusted ANYTHING published in Newsweek.
I am an engineer who expects words to mean something and that news is supposed to be about what happened to whom, when rather than what the reporter thinks or feels. I know this attitude is considered obsolete. However, reality is what it is and we had better know what it is or we will die trying to do what can't be done.
Let's deconstruct a bit:
This postmodernist expression is "LOOK AT ME! I'm better, I'm smarter and by virtue of my existence, you matter less than me."
It matters not a whit what they stand for, believe in or care about. As soon as they are in opposition to anyone, they become superior. Fact, reason, right and wrong all become secondary to the 'look at me' mindset.
The Postmodernist motto, "Well, whatever!"
Honestly, do you really expect a debate, as in both sides lay out their arguments for rational comparison?
For example, once the good doctor's post from yesterday got linked by some leftie site(s), any discussion value went down the drain. There were plenty of insults (some of them incomprehensible), nothing illuminating at all.
"The entire purpose of the contradictory discourse technique is actually to shut down any argument or debate."
Postmodernism is intellectual suicide.
sigmund wrote: Fact, reason, right and wrong all become secondary to the 'look at me' mindset.
Tell me, just were is the "me" they want others to look at? I say there is no "me" to look at except for the reflection in their intellectual mirror of the reflection in another's intellectual mirror of .... See my hall of mirrors metaphor. There is no actual self represented in a hundred weight of such reflections.
Their denial of existence/identity includes the denial of the existence/identity of a me in themselves or others. This is why the hundreds of millions who have or will die in the service of their brave new world is of no consequence to them. The dead and dying really never existed for the true believer. The pathetic joke on the true believer is that he has defined himself out of existence as well.
The anti rationality cohort in our society have lived their entire lives dancing on the heads of pins. Their way of thinking and living their lives is not new, in that people have always constructed demons to occupy themselves with. Whether those demons were elements of nature, made up pagan gods,the bad other tribe, ghosts, witches, spirits, science, the middle class, America, or Republicans, the spirit of their hatred is always the same.
Put in unsophisticated layman's terms, they just fear and loathe anything good, decent or honest in this world.
When you tally up those across the seas that oppose what makes western civilization great, and add in the nihilists in our midst, it is astonishing that we have and hold what we do.
As it were, summer vacation is almost over. Can the day be very far off when the world's collectivists receive a dictionary demonstration of measure for measure?
The kids born in 1980 are 27 now.
They never knew a time when sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll didn't also come with AIDS, heavily-armed street gangs, and boy bands. Hippies were just weird.
Welfare to them always meant generations of trashy people who don't want to work. They were told about hungry poor people, but never really saw any.
They never saw it as a big deal that they went to school with kids of various races and backgrounds, and these kids always thought segregation was stupid. They also had moms who worked, and that was not a big deal to them either.
It was hard for them to understand what all the agitating over racism and sexism were really all about. They saw it as lecturing them over what their grandparents did.
Any commitment to the Left can be a mile wide, but won't be all that deep.
So, the Lefties you see nowadays are either Boomers watching it all slip away, Generation Xers who have vague memories of grandparents who as a matter of course used the N word (and the Sixties were still cool when they were kids), or Gen Y'ers who will get better once they get a real job.-----Not the kinds of folks to formulate a real argument.
AIDS has killed more than 25 million people. You all sound pretty foolish minimizing it.
earl west wrote: Put in unsophisticated layman's terms, they just fear and loathe anything good, decent or honest in this world.
The only exception I find to this observation is, even though they lack anything good, decent. or honest, they fear and loathe themselves as well. Their flood of words, paranoid conspiracies, apocalyptic catastrophes, random charges, and name calling is a smoke screen to hide their loathing of themselves from themselves.
The Postmodernist mind draws succor and sustenance from the blasts of the trumpets of its own virtue, hence the deafness to all reason.
"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" - Good old Will, from AS You Like It. Never was there a greater mind put to the understanding of the foibles of mans' delusions.
Also excellent is a bit from a blog called "Sent West", in which the author recalls the section of Orwell's 1984, in which the book-within-a-book, Emanuel Goldstein's 'The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism', discusses the mental contortions of the concept of crimestop.
It is hilarious. I had forgotten about that bit. See her blog.
Interesting that Newsweek plays a big enough role in this issue to be "honoured" with a cameo in the first cartoon since it was Newsweek that help frighten us with global cooling back in the 70's. The link is to a pdf file from 28APR75.
Re: "... their goal is to maintain the psychological denial necessary to believe in the left's ideology. Interpreting this defense and exposing it is essential to countering that ideology."
The book recently reviewed by Shrinkwrapped, "Man by Nature: The Hidden Programming Controlling Human Behavior," provides a description of the brain processes that result in the denial of ideas and data that conflict with existing beliefs. It is not a phenomenon of the "left," however, since it affects the "right" as well; it is simply that the "left" is currently the dominant faction (defined as having the power to dictate what is politically correct) and thus their psychological denials are insufficiently challenged.
For more information on “Man by Nature” see www.manbynature.com or Amazon.com. (Full disclosure: I am the author.)
Henry wrote: AIDS has killed more than 25 million people. You all sound pretty foolish minimizing it.
Sad it is but it pales to insignificance to the number of lives, both living and dead, sacrificed to the sacred names of collectivism during the past century and continuing into this one.
I suggest there is a connection between the two that is more than accidental. They both have a denial of what is at their base with a claim that whim is a proper determinant of behavior. The only argument is over who's whim is to rule. The dead count is the ultimate consequence of that argument.
Reality doesn't care. You live by her rules or suffer the consequences. You don't have a choice in the matter no matter how much you would like it to be otherwise.
Your posts just keep getting better! "Any last requests?" That's the best!
Postmodernism, folks, is actually pre-historicism revisited, intellectually speaking. It's neanderthal thinking at its finest.
As is said in a famous book hated by the left, "There's nothing new under the sun."
As a biomedical information scientist, I no longer try to argue with leftists and postmodernists. I merely laugh at them, throwing the nature of their irrational arguments in their face with such sites as "You are wrong because." Scott Adams has classified logical fallacy in a different way - with dead-on humor. See http://www.megat.co.uk/wrong/
Using logical argument with a postmodernist is futile. Nobody's home.
Postmodernism seems to mean anything, everything, and nothing. It's today's academic Rorschach blot on which nervous modernists and others project all their fantasies, both benign and terrifying. Whatever they're most afraid of, that's what postmodernism is. On the other hand, whatever they most secretly desire, postmodernism promises (but never delivers - as you pointed out Doc).
Yes, in the wonderful world of postmodernism, you can have your cake and eat it too!
Hey, cut me off a slab of that good stuff!! I want a flower on it too!
Wow.
Good post, good comments.
Cheered me up.
The silence of the postmodernists is deafening on this one...
.
The silence of the postmodernists is deafening on this one...
They're too busy trying to drown out all opposition in the previous thread.
(Sheesh, last night it was up to 181 and now it's at 208...)
Henry, exactly how have I minimized AIDS? By pointing out that the fear of AIDS has severely diminished the enjoyment of sex with unknown people?
Yep, Paul is still babbling on on the previous thread. He's got the postmodernist thinking set on overdrive!
I wonder if he realizes that it could very well be him that is being asked "any last request?"
Damn fool.
"For the dedicated postmodernist, polls and opinion are the final arbiters of truth; and the results of a poll or two, constructed along ideological lines to fit a particular template, is all you need to confirm your reality."
Yep, that about nails it.
TRUTH VALUE NULL, OR NOT?
". . . "Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
Since the destructive Leftists thrive in "Western culture" like weeds in the well prepared but unmaintained garden, it would seem that that statement isn't entirely false.
However , on closer examination, we find that, just as in a garden with good well tilled soil the crops grow well, "Western culture" has provided an environment that is also uniquely constructive and good for decent individuals. Therefore, it must be neither bad nor good, but neutral
Also, like a garden, a culture needs to be properly tended. It hasn't been, and the proof is that the weeds are thriving. Therefore, it is the neglect of the appropriate maintenance that is the problem.
Only if the culture is responsible for the maintenance, can it be found at fault. But, since Western culture has historically, at least in the USA, relied on personal initiative to sustain it, that is the sector which is responsible. I.e., it is the individual, not the state, which must uphold the values that give the culture it's life.
Hence, I think we have located our weak link. And, not only that, I would be willing to wager that a properly conducted study would find that the current problems can be correlated with a decrease in individual belief in G_D, and the concomitant loss of a sense of accountability for one's actions.
Still, any culture can't leave it's very existence to chance, so it must be responsible to some degree. But the State can not be in the business of religion. So, what is to be done?
The very minimum that should be done, and probably also nearly the maximum that should not be exceeded, is to have a moment of silence at the beginning of the school day. At that time every child has a moment to consider what he or she has been taught about G-D, even if nothing, because that will fix the idea in their minds to pursue it as their individual initiative directs.
Then, and only then, can we expect them to grow into morally responsible adults. Failing that, the vitality of our culture will continue to dwindle until it just collapses all by itself in the tumult of everyone trying to get the better of everyone else.
The Left hates this idea, because a child's pure mind is uniquely capable of grasping the idea of G-D, and the Left can't have that. They must be prevented at all cost from any exposure to belief in anything that will enable a developing mind to ultimately realize that the Leftist ideology is utterly bankrupt, and worthless.
Where Al Gore went wrong in "An Inconvenient Truth" is in failing to give it the Alfred Hitchcock treatment. First mistake: he casts himself in the lead, instead of someone in the Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant mode; and since Al's animation compares unfavorably with that of a potted palm, people lose interest in the main character. Second mistake: no inspired location shooting. Al (or Cary Grant) ought to be hanging out of the window of the Washington Monument by his finger tips, with a sinister Karl Rove playing "this little piggy". And lastly: what, no beautiful blondes?
NASA, HONE FOAM!
I wonder if the Doc knows anything about this. I've read that because NASA wanted to be able to say it was "environmentally friendly" it switched from a freon-type foam insulation to something that isn't as sturdy.
http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/20...tures/
body.html
That is, so I've read, why the stuff is constantly causing problems, putting not only the missions in jeopardy, but actually causing fatalities.
And there are other related problems, too.
http://www.space.com/
missionlaun..._ft_030506.html
NASA didn't have to comply with a directive to switch, since it could well justify the need to keep using the older foam, as it was a more reliable product.
I hope the astronauts who are currently in space get home alright, since a piece of foam that broke off on take-off damaged some tiles to the point of exposing the hull they must protect.
But human lives aren't a concern for the Left, only mindless adherence to PC correctness.
Far as I know they are still using the junk that killed the Columbia crew.
"it was Newsweek that help frighten us with global cooling back in the 70's."
Well, I suppose being alarmist is useful to selling magazines.
http://tinyurl.com/2v6p4z
And that's all I have to say about that....
If Hollywood Leo and the materialist gang were truly concerned about helping Gore save the planet from man-made global warming while ending our dependence on foreign oil then perhaps Hollywood ought to put their money where their mouths are by never producing another oil-based movie again.
Otherwise it's nothing but agitprop motivated by evil commie collectivist billionaires who know how to sheeple the people.
"They're too busy trying to drown out all opposition in the previous thread."
They have a problem dealing with certain aspects of reality.
With regard to Islamic extremists, there are historical examples of small groups of militant people acquiring the power to cause misery to their fellow citizens and others. The Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge, and the Taliban are some excellent ones.
Jephnol | 08.14.07 - 2:29 pm
LOL
You know what they say, "three postmodernists, one opinion - (and it's always wrong.)"
call me names and you will get your post deleted. Have a nice day, Edgar. 
Maybe its just me, but i'm thinking a major catalyst for this anti logic occured at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial.
I mean if there was ever a model of reality being spun into oblivion to adhere to a desired template. That WAS it.
Well who wants to go first at rebutal to Edgar's finely laid out defense of liberalism?
LOL.
Apparently being a liberal means never having to be polite when you disgree with someone. But it does give you an excuse to be a language Nazi and thereby discount anything or everything expressed that you disagree with.
J.
Edgar types:
Hey dumbass, I'm a liberal, and I can tell that what you wrote above is poorly punctuated, and there seems to be at least one word missing after "and you.
Sanity, my ass."
Spoken like a true liberal retard.
These are posts written on the fly -- mistakes, errors and typos come with the terrain. Few, if any, bloggers have overpaid editors correcting their mistakes.
Deal.With.It.
Other than that, you have nothing. STFU and STFD.
And is Paul really still trying to score points on yesterday's thread?
Typical LLL behavior. Beaten, out-debated, out-smarted, out-housed, and he still wishes to claim the intellectual/moral high ground. I'd posit that today's liberals are not as clever as yesterday's liberals, but they sure are an entertaining lot!
"out-housed"
LOL. Good one.
SteveH, the O.J.Simpson trial showed an absolute disconnect from reality in that a jury could dismiss D.N.A. evidence when it could convict, but I'm sure the same people would believe it if it exonerated the defendent.
FALSIFIABILITY.
agw ain't falsifiable to its supporters.
hence the fact that it ain't no longer scientific, but a cult.
one which hates industry and capitalism and the freemarket.
the agw would kill these three things - the very things which have - more than anything else - uplifted humanity.
the agw crowd would replace them with the very things which has failed, time after time: socialism and a command economy.
idiots.
they need an intervention.
Man made global warming does sorta define and encompass all of the leftist hysteria in one observable package.
What amazes me about the GW/Greens is how most of them also adhere to the Marx line of "religion as the opiate of the masses", yet Global Warming is to them a definite religion.
It has it all: impending apocolypse, the need for redemption and repentence, followed by salvation for those who become believers and live the "good life".
As a professional scientist I find this sort of thinking hard to deal with when we are talking about a purely scientific issue, but as Pat has shown us many times, logic and evidence play very little roles in these people's thinking.
BTW, my take is that the evidence is quite clear: warming is happening and has been since 1850 or so. I can give many references in peer reviewed journals that point this being decidely non-human induced.
MM, many have noticed lately a subtle change in media to making the discussion about "climate change".
Which pretty much covers every possibility in weather and climate, pointing to the hysterical need to DO SOMETHING.
I've said it several times:
The Civil War 2.0 will take forty lives - or forty million. I've no idea which, and like most of us, I gots moonbats in da family...
"Postmodernism is intellectual suicide." --Jephnol
Postmodernism is intellectual [hom]icide.
There, fixed it for ya', Jephnol!
"I gots moonbats in da family"
:..(
I think because of this global warming debacle, it will take many years to replace the respect people once had for scientist in general.
Their complicity in this non scientific "science", whether through political aims or just plain afraid to speak up, has left them with a major problem of public trust.
reminds me of the quote:
...people today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself.
G. A. Wells, 1991
It is sad that a number of scientists will suffer from a credibility gap. There are large numbers who have spoken out against GW. The MSM, which has its large credibility gap themselves, seems only to highlight those supposed scientists that fit the MSM narrative and those who challenge GW are shills for industry or are evil people.
I personally applaud those scientists who have stood up against the religion of GW inspite of the Churh of GW adherents calling them heretics.
It is an oxymoron to write the words intellectual and Leftist in the same sentence. An intellectual is open to the fact that there is always something to learn, new informtion to be discovered and that they might be mistaken as to their analysis. An idea is posited and then constantly challenged. The left is about dogma inspite of facts. Leftism is religion for the closed mind.
Ah, we're on the same page on this too. The tactics of the intolerant PC left is to blackball any scientist who disagrees, not publish there findings in science publications.....it's really nothing new, it took the medical profession 200 years to accept the fact that woman died after child birth, because the doctor's hygiene was non existent, delivering babies with blood from diseased corpses on their hands, thus infecting the mother and condemning her to die. Because they refused to wash their hands, ridiculed the doctor who tried to tell them this, despite obvious proof.
Now it's GW.
Until, what, the early 80s there was fear we were heading into another ice age.
It's certainly true that Muslims contribute practically nothing to science, but let's not give the Nobel Prize too much luster. The Prize was rendered farcical when they started awarding it to the likes of Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat.
On the domestic front, Carter's custom-designed an economy that caused mass hardship, and his wretched foreign policy enabled his soul-mate, Arafat -- inventor of the suicide bomber, to fine-tune the art of indiscriminate killing.
I've often wondered why previous Peace Prize recipients didn't return their medals in protest when Carter and Arafat were named. That would have been an authentic act of moral courage worthy of a prize.
"I've often wondered why previous Peace Prize recipients didn't return their medals in protest when Carter and Arafat were named. That would have been an authentic act of moral courage worthy of a prize." -- GnuCarSmell
One member of the Nobel Committee demurred. Kaare Kristiansen refused to be a party to such a sham, and resigned in protest.
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/
...splaystory.html
He was the only one.
For an excellent and comprehensive comparison between Global Warming Alarmism and Religion, see http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/rel...uk/
religion.htm
The way I see it, the Religious Right led a fairly pathetic assault on science in recent years with their "Intelligent Design" scam. My impression is that the effort failed miserably.
Now what we have is another assault on science - this time by the eco-fascists and socialists. This one is going differently.
We like to think that scientific concensus is decided via rigorous application of reason, but it seems clear that the former assault failed because few scientists are Creationists and the latter assault has some traction because a large majority of scientists are left-leaning nature-lovers.
If there were REAL science at work, they would be talking about a SINGLE global climate model (they don't), how it ACCURATELY matches centuries of past data (it doesn't) and how it has been used for YEARS to accurately predict FUTURE climactic trends (don't hold your breath). Instead, I've got a POLITICIAN (and a poor one, at that) preaching socialism disguised as science - to my kid in her Earth Science class!!!
Intelligent Design wasnt an assault on science. It was an assault on Christianity's replacement religion that is so prevalent in your kid's class.
One side is saying "lets not pretend to dismiss things on knowledge we dont possess". The other side is saying "Sit down, Shut up, and there will be no more of this dogmatic control over societies!!".
Now, SteveH, just because every argument he listed against global warming being settled science also works against macro evolution.... Well, no really good way to end that sentence, is there?
Very few folks don't believe in slight alterations inside of a species-- dogs are a famous example.
However, there's a notable lack of six-legged dogs. Or dogs with wings. Or dogs with actual new features.
The strange lack of developing species is a well known problem-- stuff tends to show up, then stay the same for a while, then generally be replaced or go away. (Sorry to micky mouse it, I don't have a whole lot of time at the moment. Telic Thoughts, Post-Darwanist and such sites have better information.)
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